the country.
A massive Special Operations operation had run to earth another gentleman—a bank employee without any previous brushes with the law—who believed that God had told him to blow up the Vice President of the United States and was found at the time of his arrest to be in possession of the Vice President’s Philadelphia visit itinerary as well as several hundred pounds of the latest high explosive, together with state-of-the-art detonating devices.
A Special Operations/ACT Task Force had, in a precisely timed operation, simultaneously arrested a dozen armed and dangerous individuals scattered all over Philadelphia on warrants charging them with murder in connection with the robbery of a South Philadelphia furniture store. With one exception, the arrests had been made without the firing of a shot. In the one exception, the individual had tried to gun down a Special Operations officer, who, although wounded, had saved the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania the cost of a lengthy trial with a well-placed fatal pistol shot.
More recently, Special Operations investigators had uncovered an operation smuggling heroin through Philadelphia’s International Airport. The operation had escaped the attention of the Narcotics Unit, and also—a police officer had been involved—that of the Internal Affairs Division, which had the responsibility for uncovering dishonest cops.
On the heels of that, Special Operations investigators had uncovered a call girl ring operating in Center City Philadelphia with the blessing of both the Mafia and the district commander—what are called “precincts” in most large cities are called “districts” in Philadelphia—and a lieutenant of the Vice Squad, who were being paid a percentage of the profits.
Commissioner Czernich’s response to that—at, of course, Mayor Carlucci’s suggestion—was to form another organization, to work very closely with, and be supported by, Special Operations. It was called the Ethical Affairs Unit (EAU). Staff Inspector Michael Weisbach, whose reputation—smart as a whip, straight as an arrow—was much like Peter Wohl’s, was named to head EAU and charged with making sure that never again was the Philadelphia Police Department—and thus Mayor Jerry Carlucci—going to be embarrassed by a senior police official getting caught selling his badge.
Mike Weisbach had barely had time to find a desk in the Schoolhouse and turn in his battered unmarked Ford for one of Special Operations’ brand-new Plymouths when another case caught Mayor Jerry Carlucci’s personal attention.
Officer Jerome H. Kellog, who worked as a plainclothes officer in the Narcotics Unit, had been found brutally murdered in his own kitchen. Among the initial suspects in the homicide had been Officer Kellog’s estranged wife, Helene, and Mrs. Kellog’s close friend, Mr. Wallace J. Milham, into whose apartment she had moved when she left Officer Kellog’s bed and board. Mr. Milham fell under suspicion not only because of possible motive, but also because it was known that Mr. Milham habitually carried on his person a pistol of the type and caliber that had killed Mr. Kellog.
Mr. Milham was a detective in the homicide division of the Philadelphia Police Department.
Shortly after her husband’s death, Officer Kellog’s widow had appeared at the apartment of Sergeant Jason Washington of Special Operations. Mrs. Kellog told him that she had come to him because he was the only cop besides Wally Milham of whose honesty she was sure. She then went on to say that if they really wanted to catch whoever had shot her late husband, they need look no further than the Five Squad of the Narcotics Unit, all of whom, she stated flatly, were dirty.
Jerry, she suggested, had been killed because he knew too much, or was about to blow the whistle on the others, or, probably, both.
Sergeant Washington had of course considered it possible that Mrs. Kellog was making these accusations to divert attention from herself and Detective Milham, but he didn’t think so. He believed himself to be—and in fact was—an usually skilled judge of humankind, especially in the areas of veracity and obfuscation.
Washington reported to Inspector Wohl his encounter with Mrs. Kellog and his belief that she, at least, believed what she was saying. Wohl, knowing that Mayor Carlucci would want to know immediately of even a hint that a police officer had been murdered by other policemen, had passed what he knew on to the mayor.
At that point, the murder of Officer Kellog had been solved by a longtime ordinary uniformed beat patrolman, Woodrow Wilson Bailey, Sr., of the 39th District. Bailey, who had been keeping a more or less routine eye on one James Howard Leslie, whom he knew to be a burglar, had found in